You’re a time traveller in seventeenth century England, and today you decide to swing by the local playhouse. The play they’re showing today isn’t Shakespeare, but that’s still cool, you might be watching some play that was lost to history.
And it’s good, it’s something about two alchemists and their quest to find the philosopher’s stone. But as the play goes on, you get this little. Thing in your brain that you don’t think about until the intermission.
And it’s while you’re at Ye Olde concession stand that you realize that the play you’ve been watching has been, beat for beat, the plot of Fullmetal Alchemist.
And you’re standing in the theatre with your mouth full of Ye Olde Poppéd Grains, because. What the fuck what does that mean. Is it a coincidence? Did Hiromu Arakawa base her manga off this forgotten seventeenth century English play? Is the playwright another time traveller preemptively ripping off Fullmetal Alchemist a full four centuries before it’ll ever be written? How the fuck do you respond to this